Why can't universities offering courses that don't require lots of resources (eg labs), that have a mature syllabus offer them cheaper, and then courses that are expensive to run, (medicine) more expensive?

obviouslly the're be some subjects where earnings from research could justifiably subsidise the courses? Or do I just have the wrong end of the stick?

I think it's because universities are so chronically under-funded that even low-resource-intensive faculties (such as humanities), are desperate for the cash. And because there are always costs incurred in academia that aren't as obvious as those involved in medicine.

I think that the government does something clever to get more cash to more expensive course.

However I think your question is excellent and a really a mystery to me

I work in a sixth form college. We get some where between £4500 and £5000 per student. For that they get something like 18 hours of contact time in groups of about 20 for about 35 weeks a year.

How a university gets to charge double for an arts degree seems to smack of inefficiency. Certainly buildings are used poorly

Apparently lending people £9000 a year is actually costing more than the old system. Why the university's are the only public service to get a funding increase in a recession is a mystery

I suppose the actual answer to your question is:

Its a market where payment is deferred so that people think less about the true cost. (I'm convinced that if mobiles weren't sold on credit there would be a lot less expensive phones about)

There is a feeling that cheap means less good and more expensive is better

There is a pressure to try and get into courses where high grades are required. Higher is better. If students are competing to get into what they perceived to be a difficult to get into university then the cost somehow seems secondary

Lots of students are still competing for places. If you can fill your uni' at £9000 a person per year why drop the price

I think my solution would be to make £9000 a year available to every full time student. If you can find a university that can do the course for say £6000 you get the remaining £3000 in 3 payments for maintenance. That would widen access and reduce the cost of courses

Because universities exist to make money and their reputations are based on exclusivity. You don't have the wrong end of the stick, that is held firmly by the collective hand of the UK's university Chancellors.

I think a market will prob emerge - things are just under kinetic control at the moment. The terms of the student loan are generous, so people are prepared to pay 9K for courses when they otherwise might not do so. Then you've got the cap being low at the top end - Oxbridge could charge 20K pa without compromising standards and still be turning people away in droves.
So without understanding the economics of it particularly, it seems like a very compressed market that doesn't have a great deal of room for manouevre.
As people go through the system that will no doubt change - the reality of student loan repayments will become clearer, charging 9K for shite may become unsustainable as the students will demand better, some departments will in fact offer good courses for 3K pa, that sort of thing.

Basically it's a limited supply market. We're not a top-end uni, we're solid but not Russell group or owt, but we're going to comfortably fill every course we have this year, no clearing or Extra.

Admissions are massively up despite the introduction of charging- you'll get a stack of different opinions on why but I reckon it's prety simple, going to uni keeps you out of looking for work in a recession, and hopefully increases your odds of finding work if we're still boned in 3/4 years, and if it turns out it doesn't well that's fine as you won't need to repay the student loan.

The same's true of most of the quality end of the market (nb "quality" is a bit loose in this case, it's mostly about perception and reputation, there are plenty of "inferior" unis that offer top flight education)

Currently we're busting a nut trying to increase course capacity, and banging up ROW UG and PG fees to what the market can bear. But we can't grow fast enough to meet the demand- we've just got nowhere to put the students!

Because "the top universities charge £9k" to charge less than 9k suggests you are not a top university. How a Science or Engineering degree is the same price as an arts degree is a mystery. I guess the historians are subsidising the chemists.

It's an artificially constrained market, will an excess of demand over supply at the price. Basically if the govt freed the market the top unis would whack up their fees. Top US uni is $50k and up, albeit usually an all in cost, with lots of opportunity for scholarships. If you want an idea of what the true market price of a degree from a given UK uni then look at what they charge overseas students.

Why can't universities offering courses that don't require lots of resources (eg labs), that have a mature syllabus offer them cheaper, and then courses that are expensive to run, (medicine) more expensive?

One of the reasons is that Science, Technology and Enginering courses still retain government funding. So although a degree in say Goldfish husbandry and business studies, or art history requires less resources, it has to be fully paid for out of fees.

going to uni keeps you out of looking for work in a recession, and hopefully increases your odds of finding work if we're still boned in 3/4 years, and if it turns out it doesn't well that's fine as you won't need to repay the student loan.

I'm currently at uni and every mature student I meet seems to be there for the above reason!

If you have better universities charging more and worse ones charging less, you end up with people from poorer backgrounds being unable to or dissuaded from going to the good ones. The best educational should be available ob merit not financial background. This is EXTREMELY important imo.

It's what happens in the US and I can hardly think of a more objectionable way to reinforce social divisions in education. Awful.

I work in a sixth form college. We get some where between £4500 and £5000 per student. For that they get something like 18 hours of contact time in groups of about 20 for about 35 weeks a year.

How a university gets to charge double for an arts degree seems to smack of inefficiency. Certainly buildings are used poorly

They also charge £9k for a chemistry degree / engineering degree / medicine degree, where masses of equipment and things are needed. Some degrees are profitable, but they subsidise the others that aren't. If you didn't charge more than cost for some degrees, then logically you'd also have to stop teaching non-profitable ones (chemistry being the obvious one that is always talked about). Which they mostly don't.

The whole system is also blooming confusing, because of the fact that universities are not primarily teaching institutions, they do teaching and research. They aren't glorified schools - in some departments teaching subsidises research, in others research funding means that expensive equipment can be bought that undergrads can also get to play with. If you understand that universities don't just teach and that the two strands are highly inter-related, a lot of stuff about them becomes a lot less obvious than it might at first seem.

And as for buildings being used poorly - if you've ever tried to get a room booking for a lecture theatre during the day in term time, you'd not think that buildings were being under-utilised. That sort of blatantly obvious idea has occurred to people in university administration also.

Because universities exist to make money and their reputations are based on exclusivity. You don't have the wrong end of the stick, that is held firmly by the collective hand of the UK's university Chancellors.

Only one (I think) university in the UK is profit making. The rest exist to do research and to teach students. They want to attract as much student money, because it can fund more research, and better teaching, but they aren't trying to make tons of money for itself.

Joe
(and before you ask, no, I don't have massive long summer holidays - that is when a lot of the research happens, and actually this year I don't currently teach at all)

Yeah, 100 years ago, who would ever have thought that a slightly unfashionable branch of mathematical philosophy would be vastly economically rewarding? Then computers happened and it was suddenly obvious that logic was quite useful.

If you have a child about to reach university age take a long hard look at studying oversea with them before making the standard UK based decision. Our school has just sent a member of staff on a whistle stop tour of the continent looking at what's on offer. Belgium, German and Scandinavian universities teaching in english with fees so much lower than here that even taking into account the extra costs of studying so far from home you would be significantly better off. One of our big pushes next year is going to be to become better informed and advising students to look at other options.

Uni's could encourage people to take courses that would build the country into a strong economy by making those ones cheaper and the other ones more expensive.

Obviously which courses those are is a whole length of debate.

A huge simplification but in general the courses we most need more graduates in as a nation(the sciences, engineering, manufacture and technology based) are the most expensive to run even with the extra cash they get from government. Making them the same price as the humanities etc is probably the best they can do on that score. But I agree, rather than universities independently ramping up the number of students they can take some sort of quota system which universities could "bid" for so we had better control over what we were turning out nationally might be a good idea(I don't think this exists currently - but could be wrong).

Personally I think it would be a sad day when the humanities style cheaper to run courses were priced less than the more expensive sciences/engineering/technology type courses from the same university. Kids don't need any more encouragement from obtaining these much needed skills that they already perceive as "harder" and more arduous. I admit I'm probably a bit biased.

They also charge £9k for a chemistry degree / engineering degree / medicine degree, where masses of equipment and things are needed. Some degrees are profitable, but they subsidise the others that aren't. If you didn't charge more than cost for some degrees, then logically you'd also have to stop teaching non-profitable ones (chemistry being the obvious one that is always talked about). Which they mostly don't.

The other thing to bear in mind is that a lot of costs are paying staff. And staff need to be paid regardless of whether they're teaching and researching arts or science

No, it's not (entirely). The top colleges have massive endowments (fnarr) which means that no-one who gets admitted needs to pay more than they can afford. Equally, in-state tuition means that in-state students can get top-quality education for peanuts (if there is a good state college to begin with).

oliverd1981 - Member
With everybody going on about £9000 university fees, I'm wondering...

Not all are £9k. LSE's fees are lower, as are places like Northumbria.

Why can't universities offering courses that don't require lots of resources (eg labs), that have a mature syllabus offer them cheaper, and then courses that are expensive to run, (medicine) more expensive?

Because we're receiving less money per student under the new system than the old one (as well as the lower fees, we got money from the government per student - not that extra money is only available for STEM subjects and medicine). Some universities use the 'savings' for arts and humanities courses to subsidise the more expensive ones

obviouslly the're be some subjects where earnings from research could justifiably subsidise the courses? Or do I just have the wrong end of the stick?

Research funding is give at full economic cost (FEC) - it pays for staff time, fieldwork, equipment, labs, the use of university resources so there isn't any left over to put into teaching. In fact, you can't use money you get from a research council for any other than what you outline in your proposal's budget.

Money from commercialisation activity and/or consultancy could be used to subsidise stuff, but like research funding it is frequently short term and unpredictable.

ahwiles whilst I'm sure that's the theory I'm not convinced. Seem to remember the oh you only pay x once you've crossed y earnings threshold being trotted out for student loans. I was definately hounded for repayments despite being well below the threshold. They weren't open to evidence.

Personally I dont really like the whole funding model at the moment. Focusing the argument solely on value of the degree to the individual not the individuals contribution to society seems somewhat short term.

Finaly thought - if you want to make a mess make a market. Seems to apply quite nicely to most situations where more effective management is confused with market led approach.

Not that they really do, as various people with more knowledge of the ins and outs of the money have explained above, but part of the point of going to a good university is that the people teaching you are the absolute experts at what they teach. How you become and remain an expert is by doing research. For example on my course a few years back I was taught computer vision and pattern recognition by John Daugman, who happened to be the person who developed many of the algorithms used in visual biometric identification. Because of that, he clearly knew his stuff as far as computer vision goes, was very expert in it, and we didn't get out of date teaching. You can't split universities into teaching and research, places that do, that employ a lot of purely teaching staff are worse universities for that.

Research funding is give at full economic cost (FEC) - it pays for staff time, fieldwork, equipment, labs, the use of university resources so there isn't any left over to put into teaching. In fact, you can't use money you get from a research council for any other than what you outline in your proposal's budget.

Although we use gear that we bought for research purposes in teaching sometimes. eg. No one was ever going to buy us 20 grand worth of medical monitoring kit for undergraduate final year projects, but now we have the gear for our research, quite a few undergrads have got their dirty paws on it for various projects. Not to mention getting to set studies up in our nice big research funded lab. So that's another way that undergraduates benefit from the people teaching them being research active.

Focusing the argument solely on value of the degree to the individual not the individuals contribution to society seems somewhat short term.

We could we get rid of a few degrees if we did - just concentrate on the ones that are likely to provide students with skills the country needs. This would cut down on the number of students and maybe the state could cover more of the costs - sounds a bit like the way it used to be....

No, it's not (entirely). The top colleges have massive endowments (fnarr) which means that no-one who gets admitted needs to pay more than they can afford.

As I understand it, there are scholarships available but they are limited. So only the very best can get them. However if you are rich you can get in with lower results.. so if you are just less than the very best, money does indeed dictate if you can go to the top unis or not.

Equally, in-state tuition means that in-state students can get top-quality education for peanuts

That's not the story I've heard from my wife. I think it's cheaper to study in-state, and there are again limited scholarships.

But the point is that if you have two people of the same ability, and one has more money, then the richer one has access to better education. This is massively wrong.